CHAPTER 4

PREVENTING HARMS

Moving from Deprivation to Resources, from Suspicion to Relationships, and from Isolation to Participation

2005, Richmond, California

Bad accounting and mismanagement had led to a debilitating $35 million budget crisis that resulted in layoffs of three hundred city employees—nearly a third of the city’s workforce. Services were curtailed and community centers and the library were shut down. The same year, some members of the city council requested the declaration of a state of emergency, which would mean the city, which they called a “war zone,” would go into lockdown mode.1 Two years later, Richmond received the unhappy distinction of being the ninth most dangerous city in America, its murder rate eleven times that of New York City’s.

Violence and financial difficulties created an intertwined downward spiral. “Richmond was like a toxic zip code; developers would tell me they just couldn’t get the financing. You know, redlining is still alive and well. But when violent crime goes down and the city gets safer, all of a sudden the investors say: ‘This place is a good deal!’ Violence prevention and economic development and investment really go hand in hand,” says Bill Lindsay, city manager of Richmond.²

Richmond is located directly across the bay from San Francisco, on a peninsula, making it a natural spot for a major shipping port; for the western terminus of the railroad, which arrived in 1900; and for industry, like the Standard Oil refinery that was built in 1901. During World War II, Richmond became one of the largest shipbuilding centers in the US, drawing tens of thousands of workers, many from the economically depressed South and Southwest. New systems were developed to care for those workers and their families, like the Kaiser Permanente HMO and daycare facilities that were designed to support Rosie the Riveter-type newly working women. But the care and investments that went into supporting wartime communities would give way to a cycle of poverty, violence, and suffering.

When the war ended, the shipyards closed. Some other industries took up residence, primarily in warehousing and chemicals, but the population steadily declined, even as many African American residents stayed, joined more recently by growing numbers of Latinx people. Slowly, the street corner replaced the shipyards and factory floors as the workplace for many of the city’s young people. By the 1980s, war had returned, in a different form. The crisscrossing rail lines that had once brought workers to Richmond now created the Iron Triangle—the epicenter of violence, much of it related to sales of crack cocaine. The grandsons of war heroes and shipbuilders who fought for democracy now fought to control drug sales.

In the wake of the budget crisis, Lindsay, formerly the city manager of Orinda, California, took over in Richmond “ready for a challenge,” as he puts it. He saw the potential in Richmond and encouraged the city’s employees to think differently: “They were fearful. They wouldn’t even apply common sense, out of fear they’d make a mistake. Fear was like a ball and chain, holding the city back from succeeding. You know, going back to what Roosevelt said when he came into the office dealing with the Great Depression: the most important thing we need to do is to try something.”3

2007

DeVone Boggan didn’t hail from Richmond or Oakland, or even California. He was from Michigan. But when he was seventeen, his mom, calling him “incorrigible” (DeVone himself admits to being a “knuckle-head”) sent him to live with his father, Daniel Boggan Jr., who was then the city manager of Berkeley. Daniel Boggan was of that generation of black men who, if they were to succeed, had to be “the first.” He was the first African American city manager in Jackson, Michigan, and then in Portland, Oregon. He would later become the first African American chief operations officer of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. DeVone Boggan was deeply influenced by his father’s persistence and success.⁴

DeVone graduated from UC Berkeley and Golden Gate Law School. Once he identified his passion for mentoring—remembering the life-changing intervention of a mentor he’d had back in Michigan when he first got in trouble for teenage antics—he found his way to the Mentoring Center in Oakland, which provides training and technical assistance to mentoring programs all over the country, and ultimately became its director.

The City of Richmond, in utter despair over its out-of-control violence and murder rate, after shelling out millions for ineffective and punitive anticrime programs, had hired a number of consultants to make recommendations, and it invited DeVone to submit his as well. His idea was creation of a brand-new agency, an Office of Neighborhood Safety. The ONS would not adopt a law-enforcement approach but would focus instead on accountability, by empowering the agency of residents, by providing resources and opportunities in strategic ways, and by leveraging relationships within the community—accountability, resources, agency (participation), and relationships.

Richmond’s city manager, Lindsay, gave him the green light, inspired by the public health model focused on prevention and intervention, in hopes that less “treatment” (law enforcement) would be necessary. “It was different than what other cities were doing, but it made intuitive sense,” says Lindsay. “And it was based on data.” Analysis of the city’s violent crimes had shown that approximately 70 percent of the homicides and gun-related violence were committed by fewer than thirty individuals, and more than half the killings occurred within an area of central Richmond less than five square miles in size. The strategy was to focus efforts in that area, track down those individuals, and engage them in the spirit of partnership.

In 2007 DeVone Boggan set up the ONS program, which diverged sharply from the status quo “lock ‘em up” solutions. Between 2007 and 2014, murder rates dropped by 77 percent—in the words of many, a miracle. DeVone succeeded where most everyone thought he would fail, with scant resources, but with a huge heart, ingenuity, and determination.

When I met with DeVone in 2018 to interview him, he was sporting an ONS sweatshirt and a fedora. The hat is apparently his trademark, and it suited him. We sat in the lobby of his office to talk. As people came and went, he interrupted to greet each of them by name, usually with a long-distance fist bump. DeVone seemed to me like a pioneering coach who figured out the basic math behind the game before anyone else did and thus succeeded where everyone else thought he would fail.

Determination was key. “People did not like me. People didn’t think I knew what I was doing. I’ll be honest, I had my own confidence to deal with. I didn’t know much about gun violence,” he admitted to me.

Six days into the job, DeVone had his first city council meeting. He remembered the public comments: “Speaker one: ‘This dude been here six days and he ain’t done shit. We still got gun violence.’ Speaker two: ‘Why did we hire this house nigga, when we got all these field niggers in Richmond that can do the job?’” When the meeting was finally over, DeVone made a beeline for the door, depleted, only to be told by someone who would become a future city council member: “Don’t unpack, nigga. We gon’ have you out of here in thirty days.”

Undeterred, DeVone created a team of people known as neighborhood change agents for street outreach and case management. The primary qualification? That they had been formerly incarcerated, preferably on gun charges. “I insisted,” DeVone told me. “I said, I want them to be full-time, fully vested city employees. I wanted them to have the same benefits that I had as the director.” The city bureaucracy seemed eternal and unrelenting, but DeVone got approval, and by April 2007 had hired a team of four, “three of whom are still with us today,” defying all expectations. They were best suited for the job, for developing real relationships with those most at risk of violence—just so long as it was clear to community members that they had absolutely nothing to do with the police.

“I told them: Your job is to gain people’s trust. You’ll never be able to influence or direct or guide anyone that doesn’t trust you,” DeVone recalls. “They looked at me like, nigga please. We gon’ show you who we are.”

The neighborhood change agents spent hours talking to people, attending family gatherings, playing dominos and basketball, so they could connect with the thirty-plus people in Richmond whom the police had identified as most likely to do harm or come to harm. They built a rapport with those individuals until trust was established, and then offered them a voluntary “peacemaker fellowship.” At first, ONS gave these “fellows” social services referrals and life-skills training to find jobs and earn degrees. Later, and more controversially, it offered them a monthly cash stipend and supervised trips outside Richmond.

“‘You’re paying people to not shoot each other?’ the reporters asked me, incredulous,” Bill Lindsay recalled. “But it was working, so I defended it.” In fact, the money for the stipends comes from foundations and donors, while the city pays for the ONS staff and operations. But it’s still highly controversial. A 2016 article in the Guardian newspaper commented: “Resistance to the ONS method may also reflect a more broadly American stigma against handouts. While the use of tangible incentives such as cash stipends and travel are very much in line with prevailing capitalist values, the very act of giving them away for free—especially to those who may still operate outside of society’s lawful boundaries—would seem to conflict with a deep-seated ethos in our culture that opportunity must extend from merit.”5

DeVone said it’s all pretty much common sense to him: “I don’t think there’s anything original about this fellowship. It’s made up of the things that healthy people have. In my family we have individual goals and family goals. I’ve been doing that with my kids since they were young. So I decided these fellows would make individual life maps and the elements of their life map will be things they need to be proficient in: personal safety, stable housing, educational pursuits, employment pursuits, behavioral health, and medical health—support with substance abuse issues, financial management, spirituality, recreation, parenting, conflict resolution, those kinds of things. And they’re not going to develop it themselves; they develop it with a life coach.”

He added: “Our theory of change is simple. I want them to desire to live.” In fact, of the sixty-eight fellows who had participated at the time of our interview, sixty-four were still alive. It’s impossible to say how many murders and acts of violence were prevented, but the reduction in homicides has endured over time. In the five years following adoption of the program in 2010, the average number of homicides in the city has been eighteen per year, compared to forty-one homicides per year average in the five previous years.⁶ The positive economic impacts of the reduction in violence in those first five years were valued at $500 million, making the $1.9 million costs of the program (total for 2010 to 2014) a worthwhile investment.⁷ It’s evidence that federal and state resources should be directed to community-based violence interruption strategies that more than pay for themselves.

DeVone’s strategy to reduce gun violence doesn’t focus on guns. It focuses on people. Like most Americans, even a majority of NRA members, I think DeVone and I would agree that having comprehensive background checks and gun registration is common sense.⁸ Like most Americans, we would agree that there are certain kinds of military-grade weapons that should be banned. These kinds of weapons don’t serve the purpose of hunting or protecting one’s home from a burglar. Commonsense policies could absolutely reduce the number of lives lost to gun violence. And yet changing the laws would not have had a great impact on the violence in Richmond. In fact, California gun laws are already some of the toughest in the nation and the state banned assault weapons in 1989, a restriction that was expanded further in 2016.9 In Richmond, however, a lot of the killings were committed using illegally obtained weapons. Focusing on the people behind the acts has the potential for the greatest transformation. DeVone’s interventions end the cycle of violence itself, rather than just address its lethality.

The strategy is now widely called “the Richmond model,” and is being adopted and considered by other cities, like Toledo, Ohio, and Washington, DC. DeVone has gone on to create a national organization called Advance Peace dedicated to investing in the development, health, and well-being of America’s cities, in order to end gun violence.

The story of The Little Engine That Could is a quintessentially American tale of the power of persistence and optimism in overcoming all the odds. There’s an echo of it in the real-life story of Billy Beane, who, as manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, revolutionized the sport by leveraging statistics in a way no one had before, leading his team to become competitive with much wealthier teams—a feat made famous by Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball and the film starring Brad Pitt that was based on it. These are the comparisons that sprang to mind when I met with DeVone Boggan and Bill Lindsay to hear about what they achieved in Richmond.

What took root in Richmond isn’t an exact blueprint for a new care-based model of safety, yet it illustrates several of the key ingredients. The moral of the story here is that we need to focus on the powerful combination of resources, relationships, and participation. The further lesson is that thinking outside the box, beyond dehumanization and criminalization, can lead to much more effective solutions. Also, like The Little Engine That Could and Moneyball, it exemplifies the spirit that will be required to implement a culture of caring across the country.

FROM DEPRIVATION TO RESOURCES

Given the harm done by an economic system that privileges profits and the rights of corporations over the well-being of the great majority of people, it is clear that we need a bold overhaul of the system. Where our spending—our resources—go reflects our priorities. Rather than investing further in the framework of fear, in the criminal dragnet, we need to invest in the social safety net. That’s one of the major lessons of the Richmond model. When we devote resources to programs that make the most vulnerable people in our society healthier, more educated, and more engaged in meaningful pursuits, we make all of America safer. In the next part of the book, the “Reimagined Realities” chapters, I’ll delve into many concrete examples of the opportunities we have for investing resources in a culture of care.

One major shift overall is taking a public health response to all the issues that are really health issues, such as substance abuse, depression, and other forms of mental illness. This includes supplementing or altogether replacing security personnel and police with trained counselors and crisis prevention teams, what I call robust first responders, in all kinds of public settings. These professionals, trained to handle mental health issues, substance abuse issues, issues that come with adolescence, and conflict resolution in general, would be the first point of contact in myriad situations that police now struggle to handle appropriately. In allocating more resources to them, we would need fewer resources for policing. New York University sociologist Patrick Sharkey has similarly called for “community guardians,” a concept that shifts the emphasis away from aggressive and militarized policing and toward a community-building stance.10 His vision entails convening and involving neighbors, government agencies, and service providers alongside police to share information about violence and harm that is happening and to collaborate on ways to create public safety.

California provides one of the best cautionary tales about what happens when resources for a culture of care get appropriated for the framework of fear. In the 1950s and 1960s, California governors Earl Warren and Pat Brown invested in care: in massive public infrastructure programs, including construction of the aqueduct that moves water from the wet northern regions of the state to the hotter agricultural regions in the south and the development of the nation’s best public college system and public schools that were among the best in the country. Then, in 1978, California voters passed Proposition 13, which essentially locked in the tax on a property to the year the property was purchased, no matter how much the property increases in value.¹¹ Both residential and commercial properties are reassessed only when sold, resulting in a situation in which some businesses pay property taxes based on assessments that haven’t changed in forty years.¹² When someone inherits a residential property, they inherit its low tax bills, too, and can turn a huge profit by renting the place out for skyrocketing rates. An example in real-life numbers: investment magnate Warren Buffett paid property taxes of $14,410, or 2.9 percent, on his $500,000 home in Omaha, Nebraska, but on his $4 million home in California, he paid only $2,264, or 0.056 percent (this was in 2003).13

Needless to say, Proposition 13 decimated California’s tax base. Californians who attended the public school system that came after Prop. 13 were robbed of their educations as class sizes increased and teachers were laid off, and funding for the arts and libraries and computer labs were slashed.

In her book Golden Gulag, professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes how at around this time a little-known union called the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) began to make big promises on prisons. The CCPOA had a presentation that it took to rural towns across the state. It promised to bring roads and sewer connections by building prisons. It promised a funding source that would help revitalize local areas. Its pitch was wildly successful. From 1980 to 2000, California built twenty-three new prisons and just one new university. From the state’s general fund revenue in 1970, corrections received 3.7 percent, while nearly 14 percent was allocated for the state university systems; in 2014, corrections received nearly 9 percent and the state university system received 5.2 percent of funds.¹⁴

The prisons were financed through state-funded lease revenue bonds. Such bonds had historically been used to fund hospitals and tolled highways, which provide some return. Prisons do not provide a return. As the power of the CCPOA grew, it began to redirect its union dues back toward policies that would benefit it, lobbying for longer sentences. Longer sentences meant more prisoners which meant more union jobs, which meant more dues for lobbying for longer sentences, in a self-serving cycle.

By the mid-2000s, the state had been sued for overcrowded prisons, and California’s coffers were more than empty: the state was in debt. Even the prison guard union began to have second thoughts about the system. The year 2008 was a turning point: a “tough-on-crime” ballot initiative called Proposition 6, which would have put more youth and adults in prisons, was resoundingly defeated—by 70 percent, the largest margin of any ballot initiative that year. Because of concerns for its workers’ safety amid prison overcrowding, the CCPOA itself not only remained neutral on the bill but went so far as to deploy Minorities in Law Enforcement, a nonprofit arm associated with the CCPOA, to oppose the proposition.¹⁵

Since then the tides have continued turning, and there has been progress in California to undo some of the worst excesses of this prison building boom. There is an initiative on the 2020 ballot in California called Schools and Communities First which would undo Prop. 13 and restore the tax base in California. California corporations should pay their fair share to ensure the future health of the state. The generation of homeowners who benefited most are well into retirement now, while many younger Californians and newcomers want the affordable housing, strong public education, and other services, such as assistance to families and infrastructure maintenance, that restoration would support. It would go a long way toward shifting California from a broke, unequal, and punitive economy toward a more caring economy where social services and schools support families and their children.

A shift from deprivation to availability of resources means we can and should utilize direct government investment, rather than rely on the market, as we have been—especially when universal access and more equitable outcomes are a priority. To build an inclusive economy that is the foundation for safety and well-being, the government should directly ensure universal access to those goods and services that are essential for human dignity, including housing, healthcare, higher education, child-care, eldercare, and pensions, as well as basic financial services and internet access. Government resources are especially necessary when our goals have long time horizons and hard-to-measure outcomes, or require national (and international) coordination to achieve, such as addressing the issue of climate change.

What resources? For starters, there’s the $80 billion to $1.2 trillion that we spend annually on incarceration, most of which should be reallocated.16 Mathematician David Roodman estimates “the societal benefit of decarceration at $92,000 per person-year of averted confinement.”¹⁷ There’s the “$100 billion to $150 billion [we spent] on failed or unworthy homeland-security programs” in the fifteen years following 9/11, according to a 2016 article in the Atlantic.¹⁸ A tax on the rich that merely matches the rate that was in place from 1913 until 1982—70 percent for the highest tax bracket—or, even better, the 90 percent top tax rate we had in place from 1944 to 1963, would go a long way to providing the resources we need.¹⁹ For example, Senator Elizabeth Warren proposes a tax on wealth (as opposed to income) of 2 percent for net worth above $50 million and 3 percent for those with more than $1 billion, which could generate $2.75 trillion in revenue over a decade.²⁰ A higher estate tax, a higher capital gains tax rate, a tax on financial transactions . . . there are a lot of places to go to get the resources we need.

In March 2019, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: “Cost of the GOP Tax Scam for the rich: ~$1.8-2.3 Trillion. Cost of forgiving all student loans in America: ~$1.5 Trillion. Clearly where there’s a will, there’s a way. When people say that there isn’t ‘enough’ to do these things, what they mean is they don’t *want* to do them.”21 Several days later she asked: “Why is there more money for a fake crisis than a real one?”²² Exactly. We have plenty of money for what we need to do.

We must start reallocating resources for safety now—since we can’t start yesterday—because we know that the principle of compound interest holds true in community investments as it does in the world of finance. The earlier investments are made in a community’s history, and in a child’s life, the greater the dividends and rewards for everyone in our society.

FROM SUSPICION TO RELATIONSHIPS

When people talk about the Richmond model, they tend to focus on the stipends that were given to the young men who participated in the fellowship. They often overlook the importance of the relationships that were built. DeVone didn’t just see people who were believed to be responsible for violence. He saw people with the same needs as his own children. He saw people who could be his family members.

“The first thing that came to mind for me is: I have two children. It [the program in Richmond] couldn’t be anything less than what they have access to. So what do they have access to? First thing is daily contact and engagement every single day of their life with healthy people, multiple times a day.”²³

Accordingly, DeVone made sure each fellowship participant had daily contact with one of the change agents. He took these young men on trips outside of the Bay Area, then outside of the state, and then outside of the country. With each trip, he stretched their sense of possibility in the world and in their own neighborhood. With each successive trip, young men from rival neighborhoods were brought in closer proximity. As he expanded their horizons, he built a foundation for peace in all of Richmond.

Richmond illustrates the role of relationships in keeping us safe. Whether the relationship is between parent and child, teacher and student, or neighbor and neighbor, rather than turning on each other, we must turn to each other, as one of my mentors, Van Jones, has said. When we turn on each other, the cycle of trauma and violence just continues.

Lovemme Corazón, whose story I shared previously, decided to enroll in a psychology program, saying: “As a survivor, I grew up with the idea that abusive love is love. I think community is a very imperative tool to unlearn that. . . . Communal care to me is very much about developing personal relationships with people. You know, when you’re sad or you need support you call your friend or your family. Communal care is opening that up and instead of having one or two people, having . . . this network of really close friends who all check in with each other. Especially as marginalized folks, [it] is very important.”24

Safety is not tied to our capacity to watch our neighbors, but rather based on our capacity to truly look out for one another. This is what the social reformer Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, recognized as she looked out of the window of her Manhattan apartment: “The first thing to understand is that the public peace of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as the police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.”²⁵ This is exactly what the neighborhood change agents in Richmond were tasked with doing.

As DeVone says: “The fellows will tell you: once a fellow, always a fellow.”

Shifting the focus away from suspicion and toward trust and relationships helps to address one of the core failures of the framework of fear: there is no “them,” there’s only “us.” I know that right now, in the middle of this extremely politically and morally divided moment in our nation’s history, this perspective seems naive. Yet this is not only a fundamental truth of humanity—reflected in sciences such as ecology, physics, and biochemistry, where our actual physical interrelatedness is proven at every level of complexity—it’s the reality of the complicated identities of perpetrator, bystander, and victim/survivor. We all embody all identities at some point. The paradox of proximity means that harm will most likely be caused by someone we know, and this is most true when we look at domestic violence and abuse of children. There are no permanent “bad guys.” We all harm each other, just in different degrees.

The farther apart we become as a society, a nation, a neighborhood, and a family, the greater the opportunity there is for hurt and harm to occur. When we come together, hard though it may be, we increase the likelihood of resolving conflict. When we separate, there is no such opportunity.

After the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman, we at the Ella Baker Center developed an event called Night Out for Safety and Liberation (NOSL). It’s a remix of a community event that’s been going on nationwide for the last thirty years, known as National Night Out, which is hosted by police precincts and sponsored by the National Association of Town Watch with the intention of promoting the role of law enforcement in creating community safety. At traditional block parties and barbeques, police enlist residents in the effort, for example by having residents become the “eyes and ears of the police.” I don’t believe that we make neighborhoods safer by encouraging people to spy on each other and report back to the police. That sounds more like a George Orwell novel to me. Focusing on policing as the primary path to public safety causes harm to many innocent people, especially people of color, and does not lead to safer, stronger, or healthier communities.

“One day a year of hosting a block party and trying to reach our community by putting up a bouncy castle for our children doesn’t make up for the other 364 days of the year when that’s not happening—when we see ongoing murders by the police in our community, and see the effect of mass incarceration on our families,” says Cindy Martinez, who hosts, with her organization Enlace (now called Freedom to Thrive), NOSL in the South Bronx.26

The point of our NOSL event is to reimagine safety from a broader perspective, a more holistic one. We want people to get to know others in their community and build relationships and compassion. We believe community residents can do much more than be the eyes and ears of law enforcement. Residents also have hearts, hands, and minds. By leveraging all of our skills and capacities, we have a much better chance of creating safe neighborhoods. We believe that this is what leads to greater safety, not suspicion of one another. My favorite poster associated with NOSL says, “I don’t watch my neighbors. I see them. We make our community safer together.”

FROM ISOLATION TO PARTICIPATION

There is individual participation and collective participation. Participation for an individual entails having access—in the literal, physical sense of being free to move, as well as access provided via social connections and a sense of possibility. It’s related to being free, autonomous, and empowered. Sometimes it gets expressed as agency, the ability to be the protagonist of your own story. You can see all the choices, and beyond that dream up previously unthinkable new choices, unlimited by past experiences or deprivation, or any of the other factors that can get in the way. And having seen the various choices, you are free to make your own. The flip side, of course, is that agency involves being accountable for your choices: that is what it is to be the protagonist. You cannot lay the blame at others’ feet.

Agency is the antidote to trauma, according to the trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk. He defines agency as “the feeling of being in charge of your life: knowing where you stand, knowing that you have a say in what happens to you, knowing that you have some ability to shape your circumstances.”27 Given the magnitude of trauma caused by the framework of fear, it’s clear that participation needs to be part of healing harms as well as preventing harms from happening. Individual agency leads people to form associations that generate public discourse and hold the government and other powerful institutions and people to account.

What agency is for the individual, democracy is for the nation. It is We the People, being the protagonists of the American story, dreaming up new choices, taking collective action, and holding ourselves accountable for those choices. Real democracy expands access to power, choice, and decision-making for everyone. The promise of democracy is e pluribus unum. Out of many one. We are supposed to be one whole, one interconnected people: America. Strengthening the muscle of collective action is imperative so we can hold large institutions and powerful individuals accountable.

Almost two decades ago, sociologist Robert Putnam tracked the steadily declining level of participation in America’s civic life in his seminal book Bowling Alone. He attributed the shift to various factors, including the popularity of television, and “the so-called ‘slum clearance’ policies of the 1950s and 1960s [that] replaced physical capital, but destroyed social capital, by disrupting existing community ties.”²⁸ I’d add that people need to have fair wages and work hours in order to be able to participate in social and civic activities: how are you going to make it to extracurricular activities when you’re doing three jobs to make ends meet?

Putnam argued that people’s voluntary membership and engagement—whether in a political campaign, a union, a book club, or a bowling league—generates trust and social cohesion. It is a way of creating multiplex relationships in a complex society. Your coworker becomes your book club buddy or childcare co-op member. Putnam presented evidence for how robust civic participation and collective action correlates with reduced violent crime, greater health, higher standardized test scores, and increased prosperity.

According to some sociologists, civic engagement increased after 9/11, especially among young people, who showed up in record numbers for President Obama’s 2008 campaign and mobilized for Occupy.29 Yet a 2014 poll found that only 1 percent of Americans are really politically active, measured as participation in activities that included: writing or calling an elected official, attending a community meeting, volunteering in the community, attending political rallies, and donating money to a political campaign or community organization. They found that people with higher incomes and college degrees were much more likely to participate in at least one of the civic activities.³⁰

A University of Maryland study on the link between inequality, trust, and civic engagement determined that “where inequality is higher, the poor may feel powerless. They will perceive that their views are not represented in the political system and they will opt out of civic engagement. . . . Wealthy, more highly educated people take a greater role in civic life. . . . They are more likely to be interested in politics, to know whom to contact, and perhaps most critically, to know how to make their voices known.”³¹

Although political engagement goes beyond voting, being denied the right to vote obviously limits your sense of agency. We know that many formerly incarcerated people are denied a voice in elections, and the disenfranchisement rate for African Americans was four times higher than for the non-African American population.³² The Union of Concerned Scientists found that when people aren’t allowed to vote it makes it harder for them to protect their health and safety. This creates what they described as a “vicious cycle,” in which already disadvantaged communities are made worse off because of felony disenfranchisement and other barriers to voting.³³

People of all backgrounds feel disillusioned with government. They feel like it doesn’t work for them. Trust in our democracy is dropping to record lows at the very time that we most need to have everyone participating. Events like election tampering, voter suppression, and gerrymandering—adjusting the boundaries of voting districts to give your party the advantage—seem to be happening more and more frequently, further undermining people’s trust and willingness to participate. A 2018 survey found that only 40 percent of Americans were satisfied with American democracy right now, and almost half of those aged eighteen to forty believe that “democracy serves the elite” (48 percent of those aged eighteen to twenty-nine; 46 percent of those aged thirty to forty).34

Now more than ever we need to engage with each other and with our democracy. We need to build our tolerance for constructive disagreement so that we feel safe participating. We need to make our voice heard in support of the kinds of government spending and programs that will support our well-being and safety.

All of us can also participate in public safety by playing the role of community guardians. This is different from the “if you see something, say something” culture of suspicion that has people acting as the eyes and ears of the police. In fact, when we expand the role that ordinary people play as first responders, that will help reduce the violence and brutality by police, who are currently responding in all kinds of instances where other responses are more appropriate. Currently there is too expansive a view of the role police should play—they essentially are expected to act as social worker, mental health provider, school discipline officer, vice principal, etc.—while there is simultaneously too narrow a view of how community members can engage and take a role in creating safety.

We know what the impact is of members in the community and neighbors who engage, who listen to each other across differences and become involved in helping each other out, and who help solve domestic challenges and share with each other. Research by sociologist Patrick Sharkey illustrated the connection between community engagement and crime reduction:

It was hard work by residents, organized into community groups and block clubs, that transformed urban neighborhoods. . . . In a given city with 100,000 people, we found that every new organization formed to confront violence and build stronger neighborhoods led to about a 1 percent drop in violent crime and murder. On the basis of these results, which provide the strongest evidence to date of the causal impact of local nonprofits, we concluded that the explosion of community organizations that took place in the 1990s likely played a substantial role in explaining the decline in violence.³⁵

There are countless stories of the community elders who, now retired, spend their time talking with everyone in the neighborhood, knowing everyone’s business, and facilitating and resolving conflict situations, who serve as informal violence prevention powerhouses, reducing both gun violence and the role of police. These forms of community engagement and strengthened relationships are the foundation of efforts to hold each other to account when we cause harm, and help each other heal from that harm.

Everyone has a right to participate. When we take part in things, when we engage, when we have a sense of choice in the matter, we feel a greater sense of worth, dignity, purpose. All this goes a long way to creating social cohesion, trust, relationships, and accountability and, therefore, a greater sense of safety.